1998-03-05 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The camcorder is mightier than the sword. Defying low light and lofty censors, costly lab work and meddling bureaucrats, video is the form of media that offers the best chance of capturing a reality unmediated by the demands of power.

It's not surprising, then, that a jolt of Chinese life stronger than a pound of ginseng will be available to Bay Area viewers throughout March with six video projections at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives and two additional shows at the Kabuki's International Asian American Film Festival (which opens Thursday night) as part of the series, "Unofficial China."

The stuff of compelling cinema is, after all, never official - not even in a nation that maintains an on-the-record pretext of resolving all its social problems. More surprising is that these low-budget epics, thankfully devoid of rhetoric, mysticism or a dread whiff of travelogue, have taken so long to get to us - surfacing from the artistic underground via New York's Museum of Modern Art and busy academics who have already dubbed the works a "New Documentary Movement."

It took three years of shooting for Beijing's Li Hong to unearth the classically tragic elements in "Out of Phoenix Bridge" (Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at PFA; Monday at 3:30 p.m. at the Kabuki), the series' most polished and compelling film. Four spunky girls from rural Anhui Province have come to the capital seeking their fortunes, only to find housecleaning work, stingy landladies and the constant threat of mugging. But most of the action isshot in the single claustrophobic room they share. Stuffed with boxes, quilts and makeshift barriers, this makes a perfect visual metaphor for lives already overcrowded with obligation.

Yet the girls' spirits remain buoyed by the implacability of youth, a peasant resilience and the sort of feminism that doesn't come from reading Gloria Steinem. "I don't care to get married," declares one. "If I do, I'll only be 60 percent happy." With adolescent grinning at both the delight and horror of watching her fate unfold, another vows to carry on "only until 30 because life is too exhausting." When the film follows them back to their home village - where the girls face the ridicule of uncomprehending parents, the choice between arranged marriages and jobs at a wooden screw factory - it becomes obvious that a place where they could hardly move actually offered their best shot at freedom.

Rigorously dispassionate to the point of being a kind of ideological peep show, "No. 16 Barkhor South Street" (Sunday at 5:30 at the Kabuki; Monday at 3:30 at PFA) is a testament to the day-to-day costs of "liberation" for the people of Tibet. Charting the functions of a

"neighborhood committee" in central Lhasa with extraordinary lack of self-consciousness or commentary, Duan Jinchuan's work can be viewed as a tribute to the diligence and compassion of the local populace's paternalist minders. Perhaps that's the only way that it could have been allowed to be made. But Western audiences are more likely to glimpse smoldering resentment, a pathetic level of docility or simple, dazed befuddlement in the faces of the Tibetan monks, shopkeepers and party recruits who traipse through the vibrantly colorful yet miserably dank government offices.

"Looking After All Bladed Instruments Is The Duty of Every Citizen!" reads one party banner hoisted over Barkhor Street. Top cadre and cops in spiffy "World Cup" straw hats settle neighbors' spats, hear confessions of petty thievery, collect fines and licensing fees for tricycles. Mostly, they browbeat the natives with useless news of far-off Communist assemblies, warnings to avoid dangerous thoughts of "separatism" and petty bossing on nearly every aspect of life - including the injunction to "drink less tea in the morning" so that public toilets won't get too crowded at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of China's takeover. The continual condescension, and spiritual degeneration of the city dwellers, tells more about the methods and results of Chinese rule in Tibet than all the evocations of Buddhist sand-paintings or testimonials from Richard Gere.

"Bumming in Beijing'&lt;

While other videos in the series deal with dissident rock star Cui Jian or youthful memories of the Cultural Revolution's "Red Guards," Wu Wenguang's "Bumming in Beijing - The Last Dreamers" (Thursday at 7:30 at PFA) is considered groundbreaking. This chronicle of five would-be bohemians, scrounging out a life outside their assigned "work units" in the service of art and a romantic urge to drift rootlessly, takes place against the backdrop of pre-Tiananmen Square massacre malaise and the post-Tiananmen crackdown. But this circle of friends, over-indulged by the filmmaker in what sometimes feels like a ploddingly slow home movie, are far more concerned with the petty details of daily survival, the demands of secretive gallery shows and theater productions, as well as the ultimate question facing all intellectuals - to emigrate or not to emigrate.

"You can take a shower every day'&lt;

While one fierce woman declares, "I'd rather sell my body than my paintings," and another terms a trip to America

"like going back to my mother's womb, to a very dark place," a third admits to the fatal appeal of some far-off land where he imagines "you can take a shower every day." Wu's more enthralling though equally loose sequel, "At Home in the World" (March 18 at 7:30 p.m. at PFA) follows four of the five as they have married foreigners and settled for the material comforts of the West. The talented photographer Gao Bo maintains an infectious cheeriness despite having to sketch portraits of tourists at the Eiffel Tower and the painter Zhang Dali poignantly spray-paints the burnt umber walls of Bologna, Italy, to make some mark on his adopted country.

Both the before and after sagas will be introduced by a main protagonist, writer Zhang Ci, who has taken the more pronounceable pseudonym of May-May and lives in Palo Alto with her husband, an American child psychologist, and their two children. "The movie wasn't planned at all," she now says of her film-star status. "We were all very surprised because we thought Wu was just making a record of his friends, of a dark time with no air at all when we all smoked a lot."

These days, she is Californian enough to eschew cigarettes and teach an aerobics class. A spacey sort who exults in the glint of a girl's blond hair in the sun or the dubious scenic wonders of a bayshore park made from landfill, May-May observes enigmatically, "The map of the world is now very flat while art makes the sharp points. And while life is a circle, China is still a square." And she doesn't mean Tiananmen.

"Of course, it's a tragedy that most of us couldn't remain on our native soil," she admits. "But we are all survivors." To prove the point, she tells how videographer Wu has gone on to get serious in studies with American master Frederick Wiseman and to found Documentary, China's first magazine devoted to its title subject. May-May herself penned a novel about a Chinese woman's erotic adventures in the U.S., since banned in her homeland. She is awaiting the Chinese publication of a nonfiction study of 26 American women so that her sisters back home can learn of "somebody other than Hillary or Madonna."

Brain drain? &lt;

But hasn't the flight of these "Last Dreamers" left the People's Republic without the best minds of their generation?

"Oh no," answers May-May with a laugh. "They were happy for us to leave. There will always be plenty of smart people and now there's more room for the rest."

If that's so, we can soon expect more than a documentary movement, maybe even a documentary revolution. Better than any trip to the Forbidden City, the soul of modern-day China is revealed in these films' forbidden sights.&lt;